Meru wireless LAN with revolutionary Virtual Cell™ architecture chosen over rivals for superior hand-off performance with roaming

London, UK – Monday, 23rd February,  2009 - Nicolaus Copernicus University, in Torun, Poland, has adopted a wireless network from Meru Networks to provide secure Internet access without dropped connections for a rapidly growing number of the university's students and faculty. 

The University, known in Polish as Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika (UMK), is replacing standalone wireless access points on its campus with a centrally-controlled wireless network from Meru in order to keep up with surging demand from students for wireless Internet access.

"The university's network has around 400 users a day and more than 2000 regular users a month," said Tomasz Wolniewicz, director of information and communications technology at the University. “We needed a network that would give access to that number of students without breaks in service.”

Since 2005, the University had deployed around 90 standalone wireless access points from 3Com to cover open access areas such as libraries, halls and cafeterias. At first these supported a small number of students with wireless notebooks, but laptop use has grown rapidly, and wireless access has doubled in the last year. New arrivals are placing heavy demands on the network. “We can get up to 40 new users every day,” said Wolniewicz.

And with the influx of new users and growing demand, the old network was not able to cope. “Users were noticing a break in service when their laptop switched between one access point and another,” said Wolniewicz. “This break was up to several seconds long, and was becoming a problem for users.”

Additionally, the legacy network would not support new applications the University was considering, such as voice over wireless IP, so last year the University decided to upgrade its wireless LAN infrastructure. It tested equipment from Meru, Cisco, Aruba, Trapeze, 3Com and Siemens, and found that Meru Networks Virtual Cell architecture eliminated the breaks in service and coverage that students were experiencing as they roamed the campus.  Virtual Cell architecture is unique to Meru, and not found in other wireless LAN systems.

“The particular thing we had been measuring was handover - the break in transmission when a client moves from one access point to another – because we wanted to reduce the problems it caused," said Wolniewicz. "In our tests, the Meru system eliminated this break.” These positive results are being shared with other universities through the Polish academic network consortium Pionier. (www.pionier.gov.pl)

In summer 2008, the University’s computer science faculty installed a Meru network consisting of an MC1000 controller and fifteen AP201 access points, which support the IEEE 802.11a/b/g standard for wireless communication.

Following this success, the University installed another Meru network for other faculties and shared buildings across the campus. It replaced standalone access points building-by-building and now has Meru APs installed in three faculty buildings, the library and the main administration building.  Now complete, the University has 65 Meru AP 200 access points supporting 802.11a/b/g and an MC3000 controller which provides the centralized intelligence to easily deploy and manage large-scale wireless WLANs. 

“We are not buying any new standalone access points,” said Wolniewicz. The Meru network is being supplied by the Konsorcjum FEN in cooperation with its partner Poltel.

As well as UMK students and staff, the Meru network is available to visitors from other universities, because it connects to the international secure Eduroam system, which provides user authentication for wireless LANs in educational establishments across Europe. UMK’s WLAN was the first network in Poland to connect to eduroam.
 
In Meru's virtualized WLAN architecture, a single channel is selected for use by all access points enterprise-wide, and a dedicated "virtual port" is assigned to each client device to maximize performance, reliability, and enterprise control over wireless resources.  Additional channels can be layered as more capacity is required.  In contrast, legacy WLAN systems from other vendors use a "micro cell" approach, which assigns different radio channels to many small adjacent AP cells to ensure that no two APs use the same channel in the same place.  This requires precise and time-consuming channel planning and AP power adjustments to work well, making it difficult to load-balance in dense environments, and limiting future network expansion.